My research pertains to how societal values and ideologies shape art, design, and the built environment. I make sculpture, furniture, wearables, and write critical essays on how we can reshape human interactions with the designed world to restructure power dynamics in space to create new possibilities for a more just world.
Mallory Kimmel
Visiting Assistant Professor, Foundations
MFA, California College of the Arts
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Focus Areas
Additional Interests
- Political philosophy
- Studio art
- Ecology
- Communal gathering practices
- Healing arts
Personal Statement
Biography
Mallory Kimmel is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and writer whose socially engaged work challenges exclusionary design practices in the built environment. She serves on the College Art Association’s Design Committee. Her work has been exhibited at the U.S. State Department Inaugural Gallery, University of Maryland, George Mason University, California College of the Arts, The Umbrella Art Fair, The Peale, and Minnesota Street Project. Her writing has appeared in E-flux, the George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, and BmoreArt Magazine.
Kimmel has collaboratively curated exhibitions with The Phillips Collection, the Community College of Baltimore County, George Mason University, and Aggregate Space Gallery. She is the founder of Do Less Press, a small press dedicated to artist literature on power, labor, rest, and healing, which has exhibited nationally at art book fairs and zine festivals.
She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Foundations at Lehigh University. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships with Hamiltonian Artists, Montgomery College, The Nicholson Project, The Social Studies Residency, and the Arctic Circle Outreach Artist Residency, funded by the National Science Foundation and NOAA.
Research & Creative Work
Repackaging Reality: The Sensation of Sunshine on Your Face
2024
126” x 9” x 63”
Sculpture
The sculpture, Repackaging Reality: The Sensation of Sunshine on Your Face, is a ceiling-mounted sculptural lamp with a heat light bulb to repackage the joyful sensation of feeling sunshine on your face. This piece specifically cultivates and supports healing through the warming sensation and positive memory affiliation with the simple pleasure.
Communal Rest
2024
22’ x 22’ x 22’
Macro-furniture
Communal Rest is a piece of macro furniture to accommodate and normalize people gathering in person to rest together in public.
Community Cry Hotline
2023-2025
Social Practice Project (billboard installation)
I began the Community Cry Hotline, a service to support people processing the emotional toll of catastrophic human loss in our daily life. This social practice project provides people the time to grieve and the satisfaction of not having to do it alone.
Joint Ventures collective: Hands-Free Spoon
2023
Glass Hands-Free Spoon: 26” x 8.5” x 26” Performance Duration variable
The performance exemplifies a two-person shared experience with an intentionally clunky, over-optimized object (hands-free spoon apparatus) and a performance of the rapid, messy consumption of a can of soup in under a minute to illustrate the sheer idiocracy of redesigning a spoon to be a hands-free contraption.